Saturday, August 12, 2017

A Little Feverish on Saturday Night

On paper, it would seem that turning the 1977 John Badham
film Saturday Night Fever into a
musical would be a no-brainer, given that the film is rife with disco numbers
by the Bee Gees and a whole lot of dancing. Unfortunately, what can be done on
film sometimes simply has problems translating well to the stage, and such is
the case with the musical version of the film that recently opened at the
Ivoryton Playhouse, a tuneful, often energetic piece of theater that,
unfortunately, often seems to drag itself across the stage.

One of the basic problems is that while editing films you
can effortlessly cut from one scene to another -- at one moment you’re on a
bridge and the next you’re in a subway car, no problem -- such is not the case
with live theater. Scene changes often take time, a lot of time when the scene
requires a totally different “look” (hence the scene-in-one, where actors
perform in front of the closed curtain while the set is being changed). This is
one of the downfalls of this musical, for there are a plethora of scene
changes, with some scenes, as my play-going partner commented, not lasting as
long as it takes for the stagehands to re-set the stage (you might call them
scene-lets). Thus, the emotional drive (and sometimes the coherence) of the
musical is often stymied as the audience waits in the dark for the next scene
to be established.

This stagger-step approach to staging is perhaps caused
because the musical’s book has many fathers (or cooks, if you will): The film
was adapted for the stage by Robert Stigwood collaborating with Bill Oakes, but
the North American version is credited to Sean Cercone and David Abbinanti.
Hence, this is a book created by committee, and we all know what committee’s
create.

The basic set, designed by Martin Scott Marchitto, focuses
on the disco that the lead, Tony Manero (Michael Notardonato) frequents on
weekends. It’s realized fairly well, with balconies stage left and right and
something of a catwalk upstage, behind which is a visual of the iconic Verrazano-NarrowsBridge. The balcony stage left also
serves as Tony’s bedroom. All well and good, but then Marchitto has to provide
a kitchen in the Maneros’ house, a paint store, a hospital room (probably the
most unnecessary piece of staging), a bench in a park and, most ponderous of
all, ascending cables that support the Verrazano bridge. I didn’t have a
stopwatch, but the time required to set and re-set the stage probably ran close
to 10 minutes in sum. That’s a lot of dead time.

When plays are made into films it requires a certain opening
up (often to an extreme – think Phantom
of the Opera), but when films are turned into theater pieces they need to
be tightened, trusting that the audience will be able to fill in the blanks. Saturday Night Fever needs a whole heck
of a lot of tightening.

That being the case, for those not familiar with the film,
we have the aforementioned Tony who lives an aimless existence in the Bay Ridge
section of Brooklyn. During the week he’s a
drudge at a paint store and constantly being put down by his parents, but on
weekends he’s king of the dance floor at 2001
Odyssey. He wants to break out but doesn’t know how. Then, a dance contest is
to be held at Odyssy, with a $1,000
prize. Could this be his ticket? His erstwhile girlfriend, Annette (a lithe and
vivacious Nora Fox) wishes to be his partner, but Tony catches sight of the
alluring Stephanie (Caroline Lellouche), a Manhattan secretary who dreams of
bigger things (read Working Girl). So
Tony ditches Annette and pursues Stephanie, eventually winning the contest with
her (followed by a noble action on Tony’s part that proves his heart is in the
right place).

Nora Fox

Several sub-plots serve often to muddy the waters a bit
(only because most of them are not fully realized). We have one of Tony’s
friends, Booby C. (Pierre Marais), getting good-Catholic-girl Pauline (Sarah
Mae Banning) preggers (he will pay for that mortal sin in true cinematic
fashion); we have another friend, Gus (Colin Lee), attacked by a gang, for
which Tony’s group takes misguided (perhaps) revenge; we have Tony’s older
brother, Frank Jr. (Alec Bandzes), opting to leave the priesthood – it’s never
exactly made clear why – perhaps just another crisis of conscience.

There’s not much Todd Underwood, director and choreographer,
can do with this somewhat disjointed material but move it along as best he can,
waiting patiently for the sets to be changed. However, such is not the case
with the musical numbers which, fortunately, are numerous. There is, of course,
a lot of disco dancing – flashy and dramatic, culminating in the dance contest
-- but there are also some moving set pieces, chief among them when Fox, as
Annette, renders the lovely “If I Can’t Have You,” when she, along with Lellouche
and Notardonato, do an engaging fantasy dance sequence, and the moving “What
Kind of Fool,” tenderly rendered by Lellouche.

At upwards of two-and-a-half hours (with one intermission), Saturday Night Fever might easily seem
like it has dragged on into a bleary-eyed Sunday morning. There’s a sharp,
crisp, engaging musical hiding in all of this material that just requires a
scalpel and a bit of creative thinking to bring it to life.

Saturday Night Fever
runs through September 3. For tickets or more information call 860-767-7318 or
go to www.ivorytonplayhouse.org.